Naked bootleg: Redskins TE Chris Cooley apologizes for accidentally posting explicit photo of himself on Web site.

Those are balls.  Up this close, they always look like football plays.  Nope, you're looking at balls.

I am reminded of that time last spring I came across a hyper link to "Santonio Holmes naked in the shower" and clicked it straight away with all deliberate speed.  It popped up (with it popped up) and I was like, "oh. well. not sure what I was expecting."

I'm actually standing, right now, on the heels of my -- oh, whoa? -- eighth career Bob Dylan And His Band concert (cf. my reference site, NotEveryBobDylanConcert.com), as the headline act for the American Eagle New American Music Union Music Festival American Music Concert.  Woo; woo hoo.

Dylan's set was notable for the Pittsburgh crowd mistakenly cheering for the sung lyric "water pourin' into Vicksburg," in confusing it for "Pittsburgh," and the SouthSide Works crowd mistakenly cheering for the sung lyric "I'm avoiding the South Side the best I can," despite the meaning of what these words, in so many words, um, means.  A self-loathing college music festival crowd, I guess.  Dylan does have two verses in his catalogue that namecheck Pittsburgh, although they conclude that it is, in fact, "chicken town."  Get me outta here, my dear man.

Dylan's set was also notable for the great music and playing and singing and songs, additionally.

Other "New American Music Union" (wha? those are like my four favorite things?!) performances were performed by Jack White's the Raconteurs (a.k.a. the Racketeers, a.a.k.a. the Wong Stripes); Gnarls Barkley, led by their front man Gnarls Barkley, who is of course played by Kenan Thompson from Saturday Night Live; the Roots, who play roots music; and the Black-Eyed Keys. 

In an ebullient cameo, a Botoxed-looking and perhaps slightly gay-being Anthony Kiedis, the show's "curator," called the Keys' set something along the lines of "Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock all over again," which I can say, without hyperbole, was the most hyperbolic statement ever uttered.  On the other hand, the Roots were nothing short of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show combined with the Beatles at Shea Stadium combined with the Beatles doing that thing on the roof.

I was sorry, however, to have missed out on the festival's curtain jerkers, the "Tiny Masters of Today," once I found out that they were a 14- and 12-year-old brother-and-sister politically-progressive punk duo.  Noticing in that YouTube clip the strange, unkempt older man serving as drummer-producer-babysitter ('who is he who masters the Tiny Masters?'), you're probably figuring that this was the band starring in Rainn Wilson's The Rocker, but unfortunately that's not the case.

My assumption is that they were booked for the festival because some American Eagle bigwig mistook the boy and the girl for Miley Cyrus and Nick Jonas.  Unfortunately, it weren't them neither -- I never would have skipped a performance by Miley Cyrus and Nick Jonas to eat dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse.

So I missed it, but I hope their performance was nothing short of Britney Spears at the Video Music Awards, the embarrassing time, meets that guy getting killed at Altamont.

The Tiny Masters of Today, in the words of someone's words, "don't appear to have thought about what they will be named when they are no longer relatively tiny."  At that point, I suppose they'll just be Masters of Today, but at that point, it won't be today anymore either, so.  Don't be printing up any t-shirts just yet.  Not because of the name issue, but because you're not, ahhhh, so good, at it?  IMO.  Sorry.  Kids.

** also a hip buzzterm of my own invention

Having written all of those, those words, I guess I may as well collect them here.  These are replies to Tony's entries responding to what he already went and wrote down, obviously.  They're not very funny, and they're about some pretty specific minutiae about the devil in the details of some Bob Dylan songs.  But they are the intellectual property of a proper intellectual, and at least I have something to put here.


What I Wrote On My Summer Vacation

MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW

I'm (a man of constant) sorry, but I cannot endorse the O Brother version of the song, a nice bit o' fun, over Dylan's rrrraw lament.  To me, Bob actually sounds like a man of at least semi-frequent sorrow.  The singer in the Soggy Bottom Boys version, with its downright poppy harmonies, just sounds self-consciously oldtimey (and looks like George Clooney).

I don't like to rate such things against each other, actually, because I'm such a pushover for Bob and easy believer in "no one can fully invest themselves into a song like Dylan" (when he's committed, of course, and not just goofing around with something like "Nowhere Man" or "Homeward Bound").  So I'm not much of a real arbiter.  Really, though, I suppose the two versions have very different intentions: while its commercial achievement was surprising, the OBWAT? MOCS is still a (don't get me wrong, successful and fully realized) commercial bluegrass arrangement.  Whereas Dylan's is full-on white blues, all up in the Appalachians and whatnot.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII do think the elongated first lines carry some drama in their own right -- aural if not narrative tension.  Of course, as would become even clearer 30 years later with the cover albums, and Bob is not really a maverick when it comes to the arrangements of traditional songs, and stays consistent with them (perhaps best exemplified when he goes so far as to replicate Blind Boy Fuller's "Aw Shucks!" during his performance of Weeping Willow at the Supper Club).  So I would venture that it probably wasn't his idea to sing it that way, but that that's how it was done in his favorite version of the song that had been shown to him.  A version which presumably also carried this particular iteration of lyrics with Colorado et al.

I agree with you that the 2002 version is only kind of neat.  I guess it was a tribute to Longtime Acquaintance T-Bone Burnett in light of the popularity of the song -- and the fact that, as fate would have it, the soundtrack ended up, erm, defeating Love And Theft for the Album of the Year Grammy a month before he started playing it.  Plus Dylan conveniently had the perfect band for him at the time to execute that arrangement with the harmonies.  He's also clearly got a lot of renown for Ralph Stanley, who I think first popularized the song -- the version of which that the Soggy Bottom Boys are pretty clearly paying homage to -- as they recorded a duet together on an album in the late 90s.

Anyway, if the '02 NET performances, with the start-stop (sounds kind of like Solid Rock?), are merely interesting (not the first, or tenth, best bluegrass cover he was doing with Larry and Charlie harmonies around that time), the acoustic version he did in 1988 is truly breathtakin', as were most of the covers from that year.  As with the '02 version, he uses the Kentucky lyrics consistent with Stanley and the Soggy Bottom versions, but keeps the lines from the first album about rambling "through ice and snow, sleet and rain."  Folk is a song of constant changes.


SONG TO WOODY

Tony: "The question, then, is why Dylan would choose to give back to one man and one man alone, especially when it's already been established that other people helped Young Bob shape his musical style. Would Young Bob really have been shrewd enough to understand that "Song for Van Ronk" wouldn't have the same charge amongst the folk community, or command the same respect and awe?"

Maybe the lyric could've been "Here's to Van Ronk and Von Schmidt and Paul Nelson too."  (Though it is yet another example of Dylan's aptitude at that early age that he foresaw the zeitgeist of Sisqo's songs of thongs some forty years later, namechecking him here.)

Tony: "Maybe Bob just felt Woody deeper in his bones, knew that he'd taken more from him, not just musically but in attitude, in the way that Woody knew what music meant, how it could affect people, how it could change the world, even just a little bit."

Aye yea, I've heard it said that "when ... there's something on yer mind you wanna be saying that somebody someplace oughta be hearin'... and no matter how you try you just can't say it...and you say to yourself just what am I doin'...what am I saying, what am I knowing on this guitar I'm playing...in the song I'm singin', in the tune I'm hummin', in the words I'm writin', in the words that I'm thinkin'...you can either go to the church of your choice or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital.  You'll find God in the church of your choice, you'll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital."

I guess he did eventually find similar inspiration at the church of his choice.

Tony: "Imagine not having Myspace or Facebook to draw fans"

Or imagine if they did.  Hilarious incongruity!!!  Just look at 'Dylan's' MySpace (really just a Columbia ad for that "Most Likely You'll Go Your Way" remix thing) with people thanking him for the add and for the music, man, and shilling their own rubbish.  Imagine Woody Guthrie's social networking shill site.  MySpace is MySpace, MySpace is YourSpace.

Tony: "Some people might complain about how Dylan ripped off one of Guthrie's tunes for his tribute"

These people probably aren't gonna want to read about half of the significant songs from the next two albums you write about.

Dan Bern has this rather funny song called "Talkin' Woody Bob Bruce And Dan" in which he wants to become Springsteen's apprentice a la Dylan and Guthrie so he breaks into his mansion (on the hill) and tries to convince Bruce that he's dying so that he can sing to him on his deathbed.  Then he sings him the second verse of "Song To Woody" set to the tune of "Born in the USA." Hearing someone belt out "SPRINGSTEEN! I WROTE YOU A SONG!" doing a low-rent The Boss impression is pretty LOL.

Tony: "I'm still surprised this wasn't the album closer. It should have been, honestly. ... It's hard to argue that everything shouldn't have built to the final word, the last thoughts on Woody Guthrie and the legacy Dylan was attempting to harness for himself."

Although I think this is spot on, I was going to argue that suggesting "Song To Woody" as the closer here for those reasons would be assigning a lot of retroactive foresight about what Dylan was about to embark on and the legacy he'd end up forging.  Except, this is the same guy who would sign off with the meta-statements on "Restless Farewell" and "It Ain't Me, Babe" two years later, so I reckon dude does have an uncannily good feel for these sort of things.

Either way, I might guess the idea behind "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" as a closer, conceptually, is that it ends the album with the singer's, like, death.  Sweet.  "If you want any more, you can sing it yourself."

Your post here and for some of the other songs on the album have had some interesting rrrrruminations about debts to your influences. It got me thinking about, if "Young Dylan" has chosen here "to give back to one man and one man alone," just how much giving back the "Old Dylan" has been doing. It's pretty charming to see the guy -- about whom there can be this thoughtlessly-repeated tendency to paint as standoffishly lacking in generosity or affability or sentimentality ("he doesn't make any small talk between songs in concert!") -- end up as such a munificent advocate and artistic patron of music history over the last fifteen years.

He's contributed songs to tribute albums for Guthrie, Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams, Elvis, Doc Pomus, and Sun Records.  He's played at tribute concerts for George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, and Sam Cooke. He's recorded duets with Ralph Stanley and Mavis Staples.  He essentially turned the setlists for one entire fall tour into an ode to Warren Zevon.  He recorded two brilliant albums of covers, and for one of them he wrote a set of liner notes espousing both the timelessness and contemporary relevance of these songs.  His last two albums are, both musically and lyrically, fashioned out of a century's worth of music and even include titular hat tips to Charley Patton and Merle Haggard.  (Mr. Anthony Ling writes about "how artists often end up as a mishmash of the styles of their heroes"; Love And Theft and Modern Times are quite literally that.)

Oh right, and he took up a second job -- DJ'ing a radio show dedicated to playing and discussing a panorama of songs spanning the modern history of music.

Granted, the current conception of Dylan as "the last living embodiment of the link to a lost, bygone era of traditional music" is probably in part a played-up endearing image as it is the reality of where he is as an artist.  But while Dylan's re-immersion in his musical roots has been a two-way street, reigniting his muse and tapping him into a third evolution in his songwriting that has paid out three albums and some 40 new songs over the last decade, I still think you can now safely say that, from a karmic standpoint, everything's been returned which was owed.


BLOWIN' IN THE WIND

I guess they never put out the DVD of that Apollo Theater special, which is too bad; Dylan's "A Change Is Gonna Come" would fit in nicely alongside his other officially-released covers from the same timeframe.  The special also represents a missed opportunity for collaboration between Dylan and Tracy Morgan.  Tell me you can't hear Dylan covering Werewolf Bar Mitzvah and singing "spooky, scary" with the Ain't Talkin' campfire ghost stories vocal.

You used the word "universal" to describe the two anthems (I guess it stands to reason, lest they not be, um, anthemic) -- their timelessness is equally important. Even if both songs are clearly born out of the time period of Civil Rights Movin', they're not just time-sensitive polemics with expiration dates. Well, other than the fact that they post-date the inventions of cannons and movie theaters, respectively.

Here's my favorite reinterpretation of "Blowin' In The Wind," and mayhaps my favorite NET performance of them all: March 16 2000, Santa Cruz, issued as a CD single bonus track and played over the credits of Masked and Anonymous.  I also like the one from the Concert for Bangla Desh.  ("Are you gonna play 'I Want To Hold Your Hand'?")


MASTERS OF WAR

If you don't want to get bogged down in discussing war and politics (probably fearing reprisals from This Administration), you could go the opposite route and talk about how Dylan's songs stand out precisely because they're not just "war iz bad kthxbai" handwringing, because there's a lot more breadth to them than that.

Conor Oberst can write something as embarrassingly one-dimensional and juvenile as When The President Talks To God, with its thought-provoking theme of "Bush is a moron-villain" (opposite of a warrior-poet) and get applauded for, I guess, saying the same thing everyone else says but warbling it as teen poetry set to acoustic guitar.  But Dylan in "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Masters of War" isn't just saying "war, the following things are what it is good for: absolutely nothing."  He's writing about how it's perpetually futile, or he's changing the focus onto the people pulling the strings -- the same way "Only A Pawn In Their Game" is about how it's not the guy who shot Medgar Evers, it's the people who fastened the triggers for the others to fire.  Even a song like "John Brown" that gets criticized for its shallowness or naivete is also about people getting manipulated and misplaced priorities and whatsnot.


DOWN THE HIGHWAY

You make a very good point about needing songs like this for the overall tapestry of the record (or the tapestry of the tape). I think all good albums need their serviceable songs, their "Down The Highways."  "From A Buick 6" is certainly no "Like A Rolling Stone" but I wouldn't want to be without it, you know?  "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" and "Let Me Die In My Footsteps" might be better songs than "Down The Highway," but I try not to think of them as either/or situations.  Just like "Up To Me" is more of a singular achievement than "Meet Me In The Morning" (another line-repeat-rhyme blues progression), but I wouldn't say a better album would've resulted from swapping one out for the other in that exact spot in the sequence.  Like you say, this is coming after a murderer's row sequence of immortal Dylan classics, so maybe a bit of a respite was in order before the back-to-back jacks at songs 6 and 7.

So as much as I like a lot of the outtakes from the 60s and 70s, I don't think this becomes a detrimental issue until you end up in situations like, "'Watered-Down Love' is certainly no 'Angelina' but I wouldn't want to be without it, you know?" ... except then you're actually without "Angelina" on an album with some songs that are lesser compositions than "Watered-Down Love."  (But I'm probably going to contradict myself by the very next album when I will probably be agreeing with you about how The Times would've been a richer record with "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" to offset some of the bleakness.)

I do agree that, of the many songs Dylan would end up writing out of the blues archetype, this is one the least inventive.  I like the turn in the last verse from "the highway" to "your highway" (I presume the Lord's, after the song turns to address Him), which literalizes the old highway-as-life metaphor.  As much of a generic blues as it is, the verses about the ocean taking his baby and said baby taking his heart to Italy (...Italy) also make this one of his more literally personal songs, as biographically well-documented as The European Rotolo Situation was.  In that aspect, "Down The Highway" makes for a lyrical companion to "Boots Of Spanish Leather," each of them caused by that damn baby-taking lonesome ocean, with Spain replacing Italy (...Italy).  Consolation prize: the loss of highway shoes conveniently offset by Spanish boots of Spanish leather.

I'm drawing a blank thinking of the earliest batch of somewhat forgettable songs he wrote, but I think "Down The Highway" would have to be his first original composition using this lyrical blues form, right? It'd have to be either this, "Rocks And Gravel," or "Ballad of Hollis Brown."  As dreary as "Hollis Brown is," Dylan imbues the lines in that blues structure with more poetic language.  This is a practice he would build on throughout all of his different periods as a songwriter, from "Outlaw Blues" and "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," to "Down Along The Cove" and "Meet Me In The Morning," to "New Pony" and "Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking," on through "Cat's In The Well" and "Dirt Road Blues."

No less than four songs on the last two albums utilize this style, and I think that it lends itself well to the kinds of songs he's been writing, with the stacking of lines and images and fragments of phrases next to and on top of each other.  It's a long way from "Lord I really miss my baby, she's in some far off land" to the verbosity packed in latter days lines like "The landscape is glowin', gleamin' in the golden light of day" and "She says you can't repeat the past, I say what do you mean you can't, of course you can."  A quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald being reappropriated through 5-bar blues being a quintessential example of the kinds of literary juxtaposition that is taking place in these new songs.  At the same time, it's a very short way from "I been gamblin' so long, Lord, I ain't got much more to lose" to "Woke up this morning, I must've bet my money wrong."


A HARD RAIN'S A-GONNA FALL

"Well, you have to understand that I'm not a melodist. My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs or variations of the blues form. What happens is, I'll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That's the way I meditate. ... I meditate on a song. I'll be playing Bob Nolan's 'Tumbling Tumbleweeds,' for instance, in my head constantly – while I'm driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever.  People will think they are talking to me and I'm talking back, but I'm not. I'm listening to a song in my head. At a certain point, some words will change and I'll start writing a song. ... I wrote 'Blowin' in the Wind' in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. That's the folk music tradition. You use what's been handed down.  'The Times They Are A-Changin' ' is probably from an old Scottish folk song."
- B.D.

Tony: "I often find myself searching out the origins of the samples, and that often leads to my musical vocabulary being enriched and broadened. ... It's not quite the same here - I severely doubt most people today have any interest in traditional music - but given how much Dylan still loves traditional music, I think that idea might have been wedged somewhere in the back of his mind."

I might even say front of his mind.  He's been banging the drum (and picking the guitar) for traditional music since jump street; even at the height of his back-turning, establishment-burning mid-60s rock stardom, he was telling the folk revivalist crowd that they were missing the real brilliance of traditional songs.  While I don't think Dylan listeners are going to trip over themselves seeking out the Mississippi Sheiks or Dock Boggs -- though I'm sure a fair number have -- in quite the same way that hearing "One Headlight" in 1996 eventually led me towards Bob's music, I don't doubt that he'd like nothing more than for that to be the case.  The easter egg hunts that have sprung out of the lyrics of the last two albums sort of imply as much, but the sentiments expressed by the Dylan of Theme Time Radio Hour and the World Gone Wrong liner notes make no bones about it.  Enriching and broadening people's music vocabularies seems to be one of the defining m.o.'s of latter day Dylan.  It's right there in the winks of last two album titles (CDs called Modern Times and Love And Theft built out of old stolen melodies and lyrics), in the way he sings "time and love has branded me with its claws" immediately before quoting a line from Sonny Boy Williamson, in the way he changes the tense in the refrain of the Mississippi Sheiks' "The World Is Going Wrong" from the present continuous to the present perfect -- because the Sheiks were right, the world did go wrong, the insights of traditional songs were true and right and still hold all the answers.

My initial feeling about folk music tradition as compared to sampling was that I approved of both, you know, 'ethically,' but thought that folk borrowings and building-upons were, in their way, in some way, purer from an artistic standpoint.  But I decided that that was poorly thought out, because the major difference between folk palimpsest and hip-hop sampling was the different contexts they've occurred in, specifically 1) the obvious technological advancements, like the ability to record sound and, later, the increasingly-elaborate ability to produce it, and 2) the significant cultural shifts towards the corporate and the copyright and the idea that everything belongs to someone.  Each artistic act is in basically the same spirit, although I kind of perceive a difference between the two in the sense that sampling seems to decontextualize and subvert its sources, whereas folk revision almost does the opposite with (some of) its -- tries to tap into them and carry their whole histories and associations and timbres and conveyed feelings with them.

In this contemporary context, the context of a culture in which the concept of sampling makes for such a debatable issue, the very notion of Dylan using the musical equivalent of found footage in this way just doesn't register.  The modern day conceptualization of art is that it's supposed to be something wholly original and idiosyncratic that is born fully-formed from the fertile mind of The Artist, and using someone else's anything means you're depriving them of some of their recognition and residuals.

The disconnect between the past and the present and the kind of anachronism it causes is no better exemplified than the bit of handwringing about "Rollin' and Tumblin'" when Modern Times was released.  Dylan takes the melody and first two lines of "Rollin' and Tumblin'," a song made famous by Muddy Waters, and writes a new set of lyrics on top of it.  That the new song was fully acknowledging its indebtedness to the old one couldn't be more clear, but because the song isn't credited in the liner notes as "music and two lines by Muddy Waters, lyrics by Bob Dylan, additional lyrics by Henry Timrod," then clearly Dylan was stealing from Muddy and duplicitously trying to pass the poor bluesman's work off as his own.

The irony is that Muddy Waters didn't write "Rollin' and Tumblin'" either -- he just had the most famous version of a song recorded by many people with differing sets of lyrics, Dylan's being the latest in that long line.  Technically, the 'proper compensation' for this sampled melody apparently ought to belong to a certain Hambone Willie Newbern, Esq., but then again, he too just as easily might've gotten it from someone else.

Despite the outcry, Dylan has never bothered to 'defend' these crimes of his and, in fact, seems to not even acknowledge the existence of the argument, as if to say that this is what music should be and is all about, and just because the societal rules about this sort of thing have changed doesn't mean that he's going to be kowtowed into leaving behind the old ones.  Dylan's recycling sometimes gets framed as yet another one of those sneaky acts of ever-the-trickster Dylan, but my impression has always been that it's not sneakiness to him so much as it's just a perfectly natural thing for a songwriter to do, and people who think otherwise just don't get it the way that he does and the way that Woody did and the way that all the other old singers who meant everything to him did.  That said, early on in the game in The Times They Are A-Changin' liner notes, he did outright cop to being "a thief of thoughts" compelled "t' make new sounds out of old sounds an' new words out of old words an' not t' worry about the new rules."

It has to be pointed out, though, that he's one of the few artists who possesses enough cultural cachet to get away with ignoring those new rules under penalty of just some slight scolding.  If say, a Jack White, for all his virtues and his knowledge of his musical forebears, dare tried to pull something like that, he'd probably be excoriated.  Dylan gets appreciated for being 'the embodiment of the last link to the music of a bygone era etc etc etc,' but it's going to be made sure that he stays the last link, too.


BOB DYLAN'S DREAM

Complete Annotated List of Bob Dylan's Dreams

Bob Dylan's 1st Dream - concerns self and first few friends he had

Bob Dylan's 2nd Dream - walking in World War III

Bob Dylan's 3rd Dream - romantic facts of musketeers foundationed deep

Bob Dylan's 4th Dream - saw St. Augustine, was amongst the ones that put him out to death

Bob Dylan's 5th Dream - bells in the village steeple/bloody face of Ramon

Bob Dylan's 6th Dream - about you, baby

Bob Dylan's 7th Dream - surface was frozen

Bob Dylan's 8th Dream - witnessed a crime

Bob Dylan's 9th Dream - running

Bob Dylan's 10th Dream - climbed

Bob Dylan's 11th Dream - windows were shaking

Bob Dylan's 12th Dream - sleeping in Rosey's bed

Bob Dylan's 13-112th Dreams - of you (it's all he do)

Bob Dylan's 113th Dream - something came up out of the sea and swept through the land of the rich and the free

Bob Dylan's 114th Dream - re: his future wife

Bob Dylan's 115th Dream - while riding on Mayflower, thought he spied some land